Hurricane Harvey impact on SmartNet

Our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone in the Gulf Coast area that have been and continue to be impacted by Harvey. The SmartNet Team has been keeping a close eye on the progression of the storm and the impact it has had on not only the network, but also on our customers, friends and family that live in the region. At these times, network operations have the very odd position of being both an after-thought to those impacted by a natural disaster and a critical piece of infrastructure to those needing correction services to help with the recovery and rebuilding process.

Last week, prior to landfall of the storm, SmartNet began making preparations to make sure our infrastructure would be available to assist in the recover and rebuilding activities that would happen immediately following the event. While there are many pieces and parts of the equation that are outside of our control, we do have processes and plans in place for the parts that we can control.

Overall the network is operational and available for correction services up and down the Gulf Coast with very few outages. This is a testament not to SmartNet, but to all the wonderful folks at the utility and communication companies that have kept things up and running thru a terribly difficult time. For our part, SmartNet is doing the following to make sure we hold up our end of the bargain.

Station Positions / Coordinates

We will begin a detailed review coordinates next week (we need 7 days of data) to make sure stations haven't moved or been disturbed. During the interim, please make sure to use good survey practices to minimize risk or impact of any movement that may have been caused by the impact of the hurricane.

Visual Inspections

We will have a crew in market to do visual inspections in the coming weeks to make sure the sites have not been disturbed or damaged to the point that it would effect measurements in the field. We want to wait a couple of weeks to make sure we are not in the way for any recovery or other critical operations.

Current Station Operations

Users can always visit the Live Status Map on the Portal to view the most current status of all the stations. We will begin reaching out to the station hosts that are offline in the coming days (after the storm is completely out of market) to see if it is just a power/comms issue or a complete loss of equipment or host location.

In anticipation of the possible loss of equipment, SmartNet has equipment ready for immediate installation if the host location is still viable. Crews will also be prepared to fix or replace any monumentation that could have been damaged or disturb during the storm.